Microsoft to Focus on Security

Anonymous Minion writes: "The Associated Press is reporting that Bill Gates announced to employees Wednesday a major strategy shift across all its products to emphasize security and privacy over new capabilities. In e-mail to employees, Gates referred to the new philosophy as "Trustworthy Computing" and called it the "highest priority". Gates said the new emphasis was "more important than any other part of our work."" People criticized Microsoft for treating security breaches as a public relations problem, so Bill Gates sent this email out to the Associated Press to prove them wrong. (rimshot!) Meanwhile, Richard Smith notes that the Globally Unique Identifier in every installation of Windows Media Player allows websites to universally track users, and Microsoft does not consider it a security problem.

Comments

That GUID on WMP? Yeah . . .

[GlassUser]

Normal slashdot staff overreacting again. You can turn that ID off. Granted, they should make it default to off, and ask you before they go around putting out supercookies, but it's possible to fix the hole. Even in WMP6.x. This was going across bugtraq today. Apparently, if you have the ID backdoor disabled, it generates a random number each time the control is queried. Spare his page, though, I wrote this with no replies (first post, almost), and the page was already horribly slow.